A few years ago, there were a couple of recalls of fresh leafy vegetables as a result of bacteria being found in the packages. Remember the e-coli found in fresh spinach in 2007? As a result, the Department of Agriculture set up a subcommittee to study the situation and recommended the Agricultural Marketing Service to come up with a plan to set things straight, or make things safe for consumers.
These well meaning marketers came up with the idea of the Leafy Green Agreement to be administered by various committees. The problem is two-fold:
1. There is no recourse for small farmers. Most of the committees are controlled by just a few companies. According to Food & Water Watch, just 2 companies control 80% of the fresh cut bagged salad market. This is remarkable when one considers that leafy greens include arugula, cabbage, (red, green, and savoy), chard, cilantro, endive, escarole, kale, lettuce (iceberg, leaf, butter, head and romaine), parsley, radicchio, spinach, spring mix, baby leaf items, and any other leafy green vegetable recommended by the committee and approved by the USDA secretary.
2. There has been no environmental assessment done to measure the impact of changes enforced by these committees. For example, organic lettuce farmers have told they can’t use recycled greywater on their farms, they have to rip out marshlands; destroying riparian habitats for birds and they have to remove all natural vegetation so that they essentially have a bare strip around their fields. Here is an excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle:
Dick Peixoto planted hedges of fennel and flowering cilantro around his organic vegetable fields in the Pajaro Valley near Watsonville to harbor beneficial insects, an alternative to pesticides. He has since ripped out such plants in the name of food safety, because his big customers demand sterile buffers around his crops. No vegetation. No water. No wildlife of any kind.
“I was driving by a field where a squirrel fed off the end of the field, and so 30 feet in we had to destroy the crop,” he said. “On one field where a deer walked through, didn’t eat anything, just walked through and you could see the tracks, we had to take out 30 feet on each side of the tracks and annihilate the crop.”
In the verdant farmland surrounding Monterey Bay, a national marine sanctuary and one of the world’s biological jewels, scorched-earth strategies are being imposed on hundreds of thousands of acres in the quest for an antiseptic field of greens. And the scheme is about to go national.
Invisible to a public that sees only the headlines of the latest food-safety scare – spinach, peppers and now cookie dough – ponds are being poisoned and bulldozed. Vegetation harboring pollinators and filtering storm runoff is being cleared. Fences and poison baits line wildlife corridors. Birds, frogs, mice and deer – and anything that shelters them – are caught in a raging battle in the Salinas Valley against E. coli O157:H7, a lethal, food-borne bacteria.
In pending legislation and in proposed federal regulations, the push for food safety butts up against the movement toward biologically diverse farming methods, while evidence suggests that industrial agriculture may be the bigger culprit.
It is well known that hedgerows protect crops from fugitive dust and airborne contaminants. Also, marshlands help filter water. E-coli is not caused by the occasional deer stopping by - it is common in large scale food production where you have high concentrations of closely confined animals.
The U.S. government is convinced that the marketers are onto something big, because who has heard of another e-coli outbreak amongst the leafy greens? Clever marketing perhaps?
So what can you do? Go to the National Organic Coalition and learn more.
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